In 1956, The Trinidadian born writer Sam Selvon (1923-1994) published The Lonely Londoners, a novel entirely written in a language formerly stigmatised and whose literary representation was mostly confined to direct speech : Trinidadian Creole English. Although this novel has now become a classic of West Indian literature, it has not yet been translated into French. Based on an analysis of the materiality and the narrative functions of this literary dialect, the essay attempts to show that while The Lonely Londoners offers a unique example of text creolisation, its translation requires the recreation of a dialect that subverts the norms of acceptability of the French literary polysystem. Assessing the existence of micro-textual translation equivalents to the Creole forms used in the original, the author suggests that the translation problematics should not be addressed in terms of " authenticity " or even as a question of choice between one strategy or the other (fluency or resistance). Indeed, having himself bridged the gap between oral Creole and written British language-cultures, Selvon compels his translator to disregard traditional dichotomies in order to think translation as a three-part relationship between French, Caribbean (Creole), and English language-cultures. Far from replacing a foreign dialectics (Britain-West Indies) by a domestic dialectics (France-French Caribbean), far from modeling the foreign text according to the terms of the debate in the target context, translation may become a means for actually destabilising this very debate and proposing new approaches to literary creolisation.